Perceptive Travel

Tracking Turtles Along Kaisariani Trails in Greece
Story and photos by Jackie Craven

As wildfires threaten Athens, five poets discover surprising symbols of endurance in a forgotten monastery and a forest steeped in myth.

"You want to go where?" Our hotel concierge suggested the usual tourist sites— The Acropolis! The flea market! But we were not tourists. We were five women of a certain age, all of us seasoned poets and writers, eager to take a deep dive into history, legend, and environmental concerns.

So off we went to a monastery. Tucked in the Vyronas Forest on the outskirts of Athens, the Kaisariani monastery is a mostly forgotten paradise steeped in legend. It's said that the goddess Aphrodite blessed the mountain spring. Brides drank the water to facilitate conception. Then came an architectural collage of shrines, temples, and churches—layer after layer of history, mostly overlooked by American visitors. Monks tend the medieval buildings, a conservation group watches over the land, and turtles prowl the grounds like knobby symbols of endurance.

It took two taxis and a stuttering GPS to get us there. Wobbly from the 30-minute ride, some of us wearing safari hats, some leaning on canes, we entered a courtyard surrounded by sloped stone walls. Cicadas clattered; a knee-high fountain burbled. The water, which might have been Aphrodite's magic spring, flowed beneath an eroded sculpture of a ram's head. We would've been tempted to drink, but a sign clearly warned, "Not Potable." In a niche beside the fountain, ten pounds of reptilian intelligence glinted from blue shadows.

Kaisariani Turtles

Boxy and splotted gold and black, the turtles around the monastery resembled ones I collected as a child in Virginia. But this turtle I was focused on was larger — big as a Webster's dictionary, with a monstrous head bobbing on a long, wattled neck. He, or more likely she (female turtles are larger than males), could have been the turtle in Aesop's fable. Cursed to carry her home on her back. Finding contentment in that.

If their shells were houses, they would be like the monastery buildings with cloisonné-patterned masonry shifting from buff to tarnished bronze. In the sunlight, the turtles seemed both solid and translucent, heavy with the weight of history, moving slow as time... Or do I mean to say, swift as time? As we crossed the courtyard, I imagined I could see through the old stone church to its pagan past. Red clay tiles rippled across a confusion of gables and towers. Climbing zigzag stairs, we vanished into a labyrinth of domed antechambers.

For a panicked moment, I found myself alone in— an early Roman bathhouse? A room for pressing olives into oil? Faded faces gazed from vaulted ceilings painted by Byzantines. I jotted in my notebook: I am lost, misplaced in history. How will I find my way home?

A Lull Between Greek Wildfires

A burst of laughter and my friends reappeared. Meandering past tufts of lavender, we followed a cobbled trail from the monastery to a hillside grove. Gnarled bows sagged with green knobs of olives in the making. There were cypress and pines, also, and phrygana shrubs smothered in gold blooms, and pistachios, their flowers like flecks of blood. In the afternoon sun, leaves formed a silvery frame around distant views of downtown Athens, buildings brilliant as crinkled foil.

Elevated temperatures and prolonged droughts have made Greece vulnerable to wildfires, some ranking among the deadliest in world history. In 2021, flames singed the edge of the Vyronas Forest, but the fire was beat back. Amazingly, the woodlands surrounding the monastery have thrived, largely thanks to a reforestation program launched a century ago.

Rescued from real estate development, the Vyronas Forest became a refuge for ospreys, Sardinian warblers, peregrine falcons, and other endangered birds. Botanists for the Philodassiki Society brought some 200 species of plants from mainland Greece, Crete, and the Aegean islands. Conservationists also developed walking trails with markers to identify the plants and signboards with facts about the ecosystem.

But we could not find information about the turtles. By now we'd encountered several varieties, which I itemized in my notebook: Marginated Tortoise, Hermann's Tortoise, Spur-thighed Greek Tortoise. One by one, they lumbered across our path, their damp heads stretching and retreating. Were the turtles native to these parts? Or were they slipped in, perhaps on the sly? I considered they might have arrived the way a tooth fairy slides a quarter under a pillow. The way an Easter rabbit deposits painted eggs in a forsythia bush.

Merciful Deceptions

When I was ten, I smuggled a turtle into the basement window well, creating a mini-terrarium with three concrete walls and a thick glass pane for viewing. Just as surreptitiously, the turtle disappeared. How could a turtle climb such high walls? At that naïve age, I didn't imagine that my parents also smuggled. They must have spirited the turtle away— a deception to spare my feelings, like plotting a divorce behind closed doors.

The five of us in single file lumbered over boulders to an open stretch of pine needles where an art project waited for children to arrive—seven sheets of paper arranged in a circle around jars of paint. Steps away, placards displayed student work: trees with smiling faces, turtles carrying shields and swords.

Beyond the art circle, a ragged path led to a makeshift chapel burrowed into the hillside like a whitewashed cavern. At the entrance, a frayed rope stretched between lopsided stanchions. A sign, written in English, commanded us to stay out. But hundreds of visitors must have stepped over the rope to take photographs and contribute to the treasures that the chapel contained. There were angels made of beaten metal. Framed postcards of a swaddled infant with the bearded face of a grown man. An astonished virgin, a glitter of mirrored crucifixes, and saints embossed in tin. Paintings of people walking on flames, people evaporating into clouds, people growing wings.

"None of that is historic," a caretaker told us later. We met her at the conservation headquarters, a stone cottage surrounded by vegetable gardens. She sighed. "Visitors just bring those things. What can we do?"

And the turtles?

"Invasive. Visitors bring them and they eat the tomatoes." Another sigh. "What can we do?"

Poor little dinosaurs, smuggled in, spirited out, smuggled back, all these comings and goings in backpacks and picnic bags, living as contraband amidst a jumble of caves and towers, surrounded by an eclectic blend of botanical species and the spontaneous combustion of rummage-sale icons.

Even as they gnaw away at cherished gardens, I want the turtles to thrive. They are rooted in ancient myths. They are rooted in my own chaotic childhood. When the world whirls out of control, I want there to be a turtle parked in every lawn—a home that will not blow away.

The Travel Survivors in Greece

A school group arrived. The cicadas fell silent as children shrieked up the hill to study plants and reimagine them in poster paint. Pushing through the gusts of glee, we reached the parking lot to find... no busses. No taxis. Even our cell phones refused to function. Doomed to trudge the inhospitable highway, we shouted and waved to every taxi that whooshed to and from the airport but never made a connection. No room for poets and writers with canes and fanny packs, no Noah's ark for weary survivors.

And we were survivors. After three weeks of travel, we had survived seasick ferry rides, perpendicular hills, the shock of summer thermostats, twisted ankles, and air conditioners gasping their last. We elbowed through airport security, pursued luggage gone astray, wandered midnight alleys, climbed ruined steps to the Acropolis, ate little grilled fish with razor bones, and devoured baclava without napkins. We washed octopus down with ouzo and survived mostly intact.

Somehow we dodged COVID, dodged pickpockets, dodged the multitude of disasters our families feared, and if this wasn't proof of miracles, an hour into our hike along the highway, a taxi materialized and doors swung open to a smoky interior.

Four is the maximum number of passengers a legal taxi can carry through Athens, but this one roared along hallucinogenic roads, revved through intersections, and deposited all five of us safely at our hotel, which was aptly named Athena after the goddess of wisdom and war.

"Don't tell the concierge I brought you," the driver pleaded as we counted out our Euros. He had, he confessed, a bit of trouble with the authorities, but here we were, not arrested, not injured, and early enough to relax on the rooftop terrace and watch a Strawberry Supermoon bob over the Acropolis, which looked whole and new in the illumination of halogen lamps.

A week later, wildfires whipped through the outskirts of the City, burning homes, killing animals, destroying so much, yet somehow missing the Kaisariani Monastery, the botanical trails, and the turtles, some of which are rumored to survive 200 years.

Jackie Craven is a widely-published poet and journalist who specializes in architecture, art, and cultural travel. Her books include the poetry collection Secret Formulas & Techniques of the Masters. She lives in upstate New York, central Florida, and online at JackieCraven.com.

Related features:

Tracking the Elusive Loggerhead Turtle in Touristy Crete by David Kalish
A Pilgrimage to Meteora by Dave Seminara
In Greece, Things Happen by David Lee Drotar
Finding Resilience in the Mountains of Crete by Kayla Kurin

See other travel stories from Europe in the archives.